


The Tale of Too Many Tims

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Comedy, Crack Crossover, Creepypasta Gone Horribly Horribly Wrong, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Kind Of RPF But Not Really?, Multiple Versions of the Same Character Sharing the Same Temporal Space, This Must Never Be Canon, Wacky Dimension Blending Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 19:54:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 2,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1562084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By far my silliest but most popular ficlet series in which the Marble Hornets universe and the real world collide, bringing Trosephim face-to-face with their own fictional creations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet series was done because of a series of requests that I continued to get. I regret writing about 90% of it.

79 South Creek Road wasn’t a college at all, Tim soon realized. It was a house. A house that looked suspiciously like his own. He double-checked and triple-checked the coordinates, then the map he’d printed out. This was it.

So why did this house look exactly like his, right down to the crooked Christmas lights strung along the wall beside the back door?

Tim tentatively tested the knob. The door wasn’t locked. Someone was home.

He knew full well how much the back door could creak when opened, so he inched it open bit by bit before slinking in. The house was quiet. Had he been mistaken about someone being home? Or was this some bizarre trap, and someone was actually lying in wait for him?

Tim soon became aware of the subtle differences between his house and this…strange different one. For one, Tim knew he would never have bought the the pair of pink rollerskates lying just next to the back door. And he certainly wouldn’t have a bowl of grapefruits on the kitchen counter. He loathed the things.

The sound of footsteps pelting toward him disrupted his thought process. He caught a flash of a disturbingly familiar white mask before something crashed into him, tackling him to the ground.

Tim rolled over just before his attacker scuttled on top of him, so they were face-to-face. He just barely kept their hands from wrapping around his throat, but their identity was clear.

"What - " Tim spluttered. _"How - "_

His… _other him_ was a part of him, wasn’t it? How was it _here?_ Was he dreaming? Had it somehow managed to manifest itself in the real world? What in the _actual fuck?  
_

"What in the actual fuck."

The voice that repeated Tim’s words out loud was startlingly familiar, but strangely deadpan. Both him and his solid masked self looked up in alarm.

"What," Tim said flatly. He stared at his apparent doppelganger, but things had already gotten too weird for him to properly express his confusion. Masked him tilted its head to one side, clearly also baffled.

"Right there with you, buddy," other him agreed. He reached into his pocket and took out his phone. "I gotta call Troy and Joseph. They’re never gonna believe this."

Tim was hopelessly lost. Why was his other personality sitting next to him, evidently solid and tangible? Who was this other version of him? And what exactly was a troy and a joseph?

 


	2. Chapter 2

Tim was still confused, his other self was still standing stock-still, and this _other_ other self was busy calling something called a troy, staring at his two doppelgangers with a mixture of disbelief and excitement.

"Can someone please explain to me what is going on here?" Tim asked weakly.

"You guess is as good as mine," answered other Tim, pocketing his phone. "You’re Tim, though?"

"Yeah," Tim said slowly. "And you’re…also…Tim?"

"Looks like." Other Tim started laughing, much to Tim’s surprise. "Funny thing is, I, uh, I play you. Like, you’re a character. In my friend’s web series."

"What?" Tim frowned. He wasn’t following.

Other him considered Tim’s confusion, then shook his head.

"Never mind." He turned to their masked friend. "So wait - how does this guy fit into all this?"

Masked Tim shrugged, silent as ever. Tim and other Tim looked at Masked Tim, then at each other, then back at Masked Tim.

"My head hurts," Tim said faintly.

"Hopefully Troy and Joseph will work this out," other Tim muttered. At Tim and Masked Tim’s inquisitive glances, he clarified: "Friends of mine. Funny thing, they, uh, they actually started the web series that I play you in. You the _character_ you, anyway.”

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

"This is all just some strange dream, isn’t it?" Tim asked.

"I sure hope so."

"That explains it."

 


	3. Chapter 3

Tim massaged his temples with both hands. With his introduction to other Tim’s friends, Troy and Joseph, the level of confusing had just skyrocketed.

Apparently he was a fictional character in _their_ universe? An online web series? What even _was_ that?

"I even drew a picture of you," Troy said helpfully. He handed it to Tim. "Here."

Tim stared at the picture, entirely at a loss for words.

"Why is this happening to me?" he asked numbly.

"What? Don’t you like it?"

"This was all supposed to be some terrible dream," Tim continued, unable to do anything except for stare blankly at the drawing. "Why haven’t I woken up now?"

His masked self took the drawing from his hands, studied it, and gave Troy a thumbs-up.

 


	4. Chapter 4

At first the half-asleep Joseph thought the whining was just Rocket begging to be let out early. A fierce gust of dog breath roused him fully and immediately disproved this hypothesis. No, this wasn’t Rocket at all.

It was Rocky. The dog that Alex Kralie had in _Marble Hornets._

Rocky stared at him with a rather unnerving intensity.

Joseph checked his clock. It was early enough. He might still be dreaming. A _very_ strange dream. Before he could address the fact that Rocky was sitting quite painfully on top of Joseph’s legs, he became aware that Troy appeared to be staring at him as well.

“Uh, Troy?” Joseph asked. “A little help here?”

“Who?”

Wait. Wait for just one second. Looked exactly like Troy, familiar brown cap, clutching a camera?

Was this…Jay? Like, the _fictional_ Jay they had made up for _Marble Hornets?_

What exactly was going on here?

Joseph stared at Jay. Then stared at Rocky. Rocky and Jay stared back. Then he groped for his phone on his beside table and, without once breaking eye contact with Jay, dialed Troy’s number.

When Troy finally answered, he sounded winded, like he’d just stopped laughing.

“Yeah?”

“Troy, you gotta come over. You gotta come over right now,” Joseph muttered tensely. “You’re not gonna believe this, but you know Jay? The character? From _Marble Hornets?_ Yeah, he’s here. _He’s in my house.”_

“Wait, Joseph, slow down. _Who’s_ in your house?”

“Jay! Jay from _Marble fucking Hornets._ Oh, and Rocky, too.”

_“…who?”_


	5. Chapter 5

Funny drawings and pink rollerskates aside, Tim found his alternate self quite agreeable. His friend Troy seemed endlessly fascinated with Tim, asking him questions about his life and looking increasingly guilty when Tim answered.

“I feel _really_ bad for giving you such a shitty life, now,” Troy confessed. “Sorry, man.”

“You didn’t know I was real,” Tim offered. If he was right and this was all just some weird nightmare, he might as well play along. And maybe think long and hard about what he’d eaten the night before.

Weirdly enough, his, erm… _other_ other self, the masked self that wasn’t technically supposed to exist, was refraining from tackling anyone. Instead they were now perched on top of Other Tim’s kitchen table, clinging to the drawing Troy had made of Tim. Other Tim tried to shoo them off the table, but they made a bizarre chittering sound every time he tried, and whenever they attempted to rescue Troy’s drawing they only clung to it fiercely.

“I guess old Masky’s no less of a pain in real life, huh?” Troy joked.

“…Masky?”

“That’s what we called him. Well, what the fans started calling him,” Other Tim explained.

“He has…fans?” The thought was certainly a strange one.

Other Tim and Troy exchanged a strange look. Other Tim looked kind of terrified; Troy looked like he was fighting back a grin.

“Yup.” Troy opened up his laptop and started typing ‘Masky’ into the search bar. “Take a look.”

Intrigued, Tim began scrolling through the results. Half of them labeled Masky as something called a ‘creepypasta’…whatever the hell that was. Tim doubted that “Masky” could cook anything, much less pasta. Some of the websites had pictures of a strange blue-eyed fellow with ridiculously fluffy hair, a yellow coat, and…was his mask _blushing?_

Tim looked back at the masked version of him sitting on the table. They had now taken to hissing threateningly whenever anyone came within a foot of him. He looked back at the drawings. Many of the artistic renderings were very, _very_ liberal interpretations of his other self, he concluded.

That only made Tim curious. He clicked on the “image search” next and immediately wished he hadn’t.

“Holy _shit!”_ he swore violently, covering his eyes. “Who would – _why_ would… _why?”_

“Aw, hell,” Other Tim said, pausing from his attempt to chase Masky off the table with a broom. “He found the creepypasta porn, didn’t he?”

 _“What kind of fans do you guys have?”_ wailed Tim. He fervently wished he could down a jug of deep-clean brain bleach right now.

Troy was laughing so hard that it took him a minute to notice that his cell phone was buzzing with an incoming call.

“Yeah? Wait, Joseph, slow down. _Who’s_ in your house?”

Tim, Other Tim, and Masky all stopped what they were doing and stared. Troy’s amusement quickly dissolved into disbelief.

_“…who?”_


	6. Chapter 6

More and more people were entering the house now, the house they had thought belonged to their host but apparently did not really. They did not question when they had stopped sharing a body with their host, for it did not matter. They were free.

This table was very comfortable.

The surface was raised but open, and they liked the nice picture. The one who looked like their host but was not their host kept trying to force them off the table. They did not like that, making the most menacing noises they could to scare him away.

They did not scare him away. He actually seemed more amused than anything, which only irritated them. Were they not being terrifying enough?

The voices of the other two, their host and the one who had given them the nice picture, were growing more agitated.

No matter. They had their table and their picture, and that was good.

They were now being poked with a stabby wooden thing with _bristles._ They didn’t like that. They swiped at the poking-man furiously, but their position on the table was too awkward for their attack to have any effect. It only compromised their defense so the poking-man could shove them with the stabby bristle-y thing and send them careening off the tabletop.

Humiliated and enraged that they had lost their territory, they scuttled off to the nearest dark space.

Which happened to be a closet.

It was a very nice closet.

They gripped their picture and huddled there, enjoying the enclosed dark space. They happily ignored the banging on the door and the shouting from the outside, content to wait for night to come so they could tackle their foes and drive them away from their new territory.

 


	7. Chapter 7

Alex burst into Tim’s house, lead pipe at the ready, but stopped dead in his tracks when he realized that in addition to Tim and Jay, there appeared to be another, secondary Tim.

Even for Alex, who normally had some pretty weird days, this didn’t make sense.

"Um…" The pipe dropped to his side. "What?"

"That pretty much sums up how I feel," said one of the Tims amiably. The other Tim folded his arms and scowled.

"We should tie him up," he muttered. "He’s dangerous."

"Only because we wrote him that way," sighed Jay. He turned to face Alex with an apologetic smile. "Sorry about that. I’m Troy, that’s Tim, and that’s…uh… _other_ Tim.”

"How come I have to be other Tim?" complained…Other Tim. "I was here first! I helped _make_ Tim. Hell, I _play_ Tim.”

"Because you’re less psychologically traumatized than he is," argued Jay-but-now-his-name-was-Troy?

Alex’s head hurt.

"Sit down." Troy offered him a chair. "We’ll catch you up."

"Is anyone else concerned with the fact that Masky has barricaded himself in my closet?" Other Tim asked.

"I’m concerned that you just let a murderer into your house," said the Tim who wasn’t Other Tim.

"Yeah, listen, sorry about that," mumbled Troy as he guided the dazed Alex Kralie over a chair. "You just made a pretty swell villain."

Alex was lost. What was a Masky? Why were there two Tims in the room? Who even _were_ these people?

"Getting another call from Joseph," Troy was saying. "Hold on. He’s not gonna _believe_ this - wait, _what?”_ A mixture of alarm and pure joy spread across his face and he doubled over with laughter.

Alex stared. What was going on here?

"You’ll never guess," panted Troy between snickers. "Who Joseph has just ran into."

"I’m guessing it’s not Alex or, uh, Tim," guessed Other Tim.

"Nope." Troy grinned. "Like I said, you’ll never guess."

 


	8. Chapter 8

Joseph slammed on the breaks when he saw the familiar brown shape trekking along the side of the road. Jay nearly dropped the camera and Rocky began barking ferociously.

"What was that for?" demanded Jay.

"Wow." Joseph pinched the bridge of his nose, shook his head, and opened the car door. "Just…wow."

He made his way over to the hooded figure. He knew exactly who it was, the one they’d dubbed “mystery fella” but others liked to refer to as “Hoody.”

"Hey!" he waved. "Hooded…guy! Over here?"

Hoody looked like he wanted to bolt, but there was nowhere to run and Joseph had a car.

"It’s okay!" Joseph called. "I’m not, uh, I’m not Alex! I just, um, happen to look a lot like him."

Hoody crept closer, studied him.

"I’m heading to a friend’s house to sort this all out." Joseph inclined his head at his already full car. "Maybe you should come along?"

Hoody examined him for a minute more and gave him a tentative thumbs-up.

"Come on, then."

Hoody clamored into the backseat next to Jay and Rocky. Joseph sighed wearily. This was going to be a fun trip. Whatever kind of weird dream this was, he hoped it would be over soon.

He took out his phone and dialed Troy. He was going to want to hear about this.

 


	9. Chapter 9

"Okay. So."

With Tim’s help (non-psychologically-damaged Tim, that is), Troy had set up an impromptu whiteboard and written everyone’s names on it. After coaxing Masky out of the closet with the help of Hoody, they managed to assemble everyone in Tim’s living room. Masky and Hoody maintained a wary distance from one another, Jay and Tim wouldn’t even make eye contact, and Joseph was the only one who would agree to sit next to Alex (Alex actually looked a little forlorn at this fact).

Rocky curled up and fell asleep on the floor.

"It looks like the line between fiction and real life have blurred," Troy surmised. "So that _you guys - “_ he indicated Jay, Tim, Alex, Masky, and Hoody with a nod of his head ” - somehow crossed into the real world. Because here, you’re just fictional. And then you stopped being fictional.”

Troy drew a circle around his, Tim, and Joseph’s names and another circle around Jay, Tim, Alex, Masky, and Hoody’s names, then finally a bigger circle that encompassed the two previous circles.

"But how is that even possible?" asked Jay timidly, raising one hand as if they were back in grade school. "I mean, it _felt_ real to me.”

"It _was_ real,” Joseph broke in. “For you. But something’s caused everything to go… _thpppt.”_

 _"Fantastic_ technical jargon there, Joseph,” Tim (non-traumatized-Tim) commented.

"So how do we get things back to normal?" piped Alex up from the seat on the very farthest edge of the room. "I mean, no offense, but I feel like this is too weird for us to stay here forever."

"Well it doesn’t make sense that we would exist in the same universe." Troy drew a line between the circle with his, Tim, and Joseph’s names and the circle containing the names of Jay and company. "There’s no logical reason for it happening unless someone was wacky enough to narrate it."

"What?" Tim raised his eyebrows. "You mean we’re, like…in someone’s fantasy?"

"Exactly," Troy replied, pleased that his friend’s fictional counterpart had grasped the topic so quickly. "So that means something _really_ weird is bound to happen soon.”

"Even weirder than what’s happened already, you mean?" Jay looked like this was the worst news he’d received in a long time.

"Any minute."

Silence.

Then Sonic the fucking Hedgehog came in (he was going exactly the right amount of fast), shook all of their hands, threw some rings into the air, and Tim W. finally woke up from the very long, very convoluted dream that didn’t make narrative sense and frequently switched points of view.

 


End file.
